Claim CH710.2:

Thousands of clay and stone figurines discovered in Acambaro, Mexico,
include figurines of dinosaurs. They are apparently from the preclassical
Chupicuaro Culture (800 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.). Radiocarbon and
thermoluminescent dating gives them even older ages. These figurines show
that the ancient people were familiar with dinosaurs.

Response:

The figurines show every evidence of being recent folk art,
fraudulently buried in an archeological excavation. De Peso (1953)
made the following observations:

The surfaces of the figurines were new. They were not marred by a
patina or coating of soluble salts characteristic of genuinely old
artifacts from the same area. The owner said none of the figures had
been washed in acid. Edges of depressions were sharp and new. No
dirt was packed into crevices.

Genuine archeological relics of fragile items are almost always
found in fragments. Finding more than 30,000 such items in pristine
condition is unheard of. The excavators of the artifacts were
"neither careful nor experienced" in their field technique, yet no
marks of their shovels, mattocks, or picks were noted in any of the
32,000 specimens. Some figurines were broken, but the breaks were
unworn and apparently deliberate to suggest age. No parts were
missing.

"The author spent two days watching the excavators burrow and dig;
during the course of their search they managed to break a number of
authentic prehistoric objects. On the second day the two struck a
cache and the author examined the material in situ. The cache had
been very recently buried by digging a down sloping tunnel into the
black fill dirt of the prehistoric room. This fill ran to a depth
of approximately 1.30 m. Within the stratum there were authentic
Tarascan sherds, obsidian blades, tripod metates, manos, etc., but
these objects held no concern for the excavators. In burying the
cache of figurines, the natives had unwittingly cut some 15
cms. below the black fill into the sterile red earth floor of the
prehistoric room. In back-filling the tunnel they mixed this red
sterile earth with black earth; the tracing of their original
excavation was, as a result, a simple task" (Di Peso 1953, 388).

Fresh manure was found in the tunnel fill.

Fingerprints were found in freshly packed earth that filled an
excavated bowl.

The story of their discovery gives a motive for fraud. Waldemar
Julsrud, who hired workers to excavate a Chupicuaro site in 1945, paid
workers a peso apiece for intact figurines. It very well may have been
more economical for the workers to make figurines than to discover and
excavate them. Given the quantity that he received, the contribution
to the peasants' economy would have been substantial.

The figurines are not from the Chupicuaro. They came from within a
single-component Tarascan ruin. The Tarascan are post-classical and
historical, emerging between 900 and 1522 C.E.

If authentic, the figurines imply even more archeological anomalies:

If the figurines really were based on actual dinosaurs, why have no
dinosaur fossils been found in the Acambaro region?

Why did no other Mexican cultures record any dinosaurs?

What caused the dinosaurs to disappear in the last 1,100 years?

There is no credible information to support the claims. The only
sources are pseudoscience journalists, creationists, and crackpots, who
have obvious ulterior motives for gullibility. Their own dating
results are discordant with each other and with the ages of the
native cultures, and even attempting to do carbon dating on
the inorganic figurines shows their incompetence.